None other than Pushkin, she liked to point out, said the name suited her perfectly.

Milotchka brought a small fortune to the marriage, but Ilya Ivanovich had soon drunk and gambled it away, and the couple were forced to retreat to the old Mechnikov estate in Ukraine. Ilya Ivanovich occupied himself with planning meals and playing cards, and Milotchka raised the children.

Her youngest son — Ilya like his father — was highly sensitive, with his mother’s large dark eyes. As a boy, he saw a fight between some villagers and soldiers over the mistreatment of a local woman (a soldier had pushed her down and stuffed her mouth with dirt) — and from that he developed a distrust of crowds and a horror of violence.

He and his older brother wrote a drama called “Burning Tea”, in which the hero offered a friend a cup that was too hot. The friend burnt his tongue. A duel ensued. After that, Mechnikov abandoned literature.

Instead, like his illustrious forebear, Ilya Ilyich Mechnikov devoted himself to matters of theology, philosophy, and ethics. He studied Buddhism and Taoism, disharmonies in the human organism, the immortality of cells, the immune system, aging, and the impact of cultured milk on digestion. His central obsession was a philosophy of life he called Orthobiosis.

He opposed taking the body as a source of evil. His mind was tormented by images of dervishes beating their heads in with clubs, Hindu fakirs hanging themselves by hooks, and Russian mystics castrating themselves. Ironically, he pointed out, despising the body turned humans into beasts:

“Hermits resorted to the lairs of animals, abandoned their clothing and went about naked with shaggy and disordered hair.”

Mechnikov held that the fear of death, though nearly universal, was nothing but superstition. He cited a Swiss alpinist who pointed out that tourists who’d had serious falls or nearly frozen to death reported feeling, above all, “a sensation of ecstasy”.

But when Mechnikov’s first wife died of tuberculosis, he took a large dose of opium, trying to do himself in. When that proved unsuccessful, he stripped, doused himself with icy water, and walked out into the cold, only to find his mind captured by an image of dayflies swarming a lantern. The thought of their short lifespan awakened his sense of wonder, and he turned home to save himself.

Mechnikov finally settled near the Pasteurs on Rue d’Ulm in Paris and opened his home to cultivated visitors. He’d spent time with the Tolstoys while researching Studies of Human Nature, and Lev’s sons often visited him when in Paris. Among the young scientists who sought his support was an aspiring zoologist named Emil Racoviță, a luxuriously mustachioed Moldovan with a taste for acid humor.

Mechnikov recommended Racoviță to the Atlantic research center in Roscoff, introducing him to a French researcher there named Louis Boutan. Racoviță spent several months in Roscoff studying marine and coastal organisms. In the evenings he convened with Boutan, who was assembling notes from a recent trip to Asia where he’d been studying pearls.

Now Gerlache just had to get a crew together — a navigator, a captain, some adventurous sailors. He needed a zoologist with the right combination of competence and madness, and that was proving difficult. He asked all over Belgium and France. Finally the Pasteurs sent him to Mechnikov, and Mechnikov sent him to Racoviță. But when they sent for the Moldovan in Roscoff, they heard he’d been called home for military service.

Gerlache pulled some diplomatic strings and had the zoologist released from his martial obligations. He’d have to sail from Constantinople, and it was too late to circle all the way up to Antwerp, so Gerlache told him to head straight to South America.

Racoviță had arrived early and gone ahead to Punta Arenas. They’d have to find him there, in the world’s southernmost town.

They stopped in Montevideo along the way, where dense smoke rose from chimneyed houses set along bustling granite promenades. They could find no butter, though, so bought tubs of condensed milk and cane sugar mixed with the marrow of cow bones, which turned out to be delicious.

Punta Arenas was a former prison colony, now a town of exiles and adventurers. Cook saw it as “a terminal moraine to a restless stream of human life, a true Magellanic metropolis.”

He befriended a German who, he said, ordered drinks in English, conducted business in Spanish, and prayed in Italian.

But crossing the city they stepped along dirt roads full of stagnant pools, heaps of ash, tree stumps, broken carts, and dead dogs. Cowboys were well-dressed, but miners, rich or poor, were “rigged in rags”.

Cook talked to a miner who’d tried to win the heart of an Ona girl — tall, black-eyed, wrapped in fur. She’d “agreed to be stolen”, he said, but then kept telling him she was going mushroom hunting only to disappear for days on end. He followed her and found her in the forest with a lover.

A fine-looking man, the miner had to admit.

He made them an offer: How about the lover join their household?

They passed Point Virgins, then Port Famine. Skeletons of wrecked ships rocked in the shallows.

At Cape Anna, birdcalls echoed off the cliffs so loudly they couldn’t hear each other. The rocks below were covered with snoring sea-leopards. Whales spouted and breached. Ice fractured, sounding like cannon fire. At night, the sea glittered and the ice sparkled and it was impossible to sleep.

“A stillness in the atmosphere”, Cook wrote, “fascinates the soul but overpowers the mind”.

Racoviță and a geologist disembarked, and Cook followed them with his looking glass from aboard ship until they disappeared in the darkness. Then he could only hear the echo of the geologist’s hammer and the chorus of penguins that greeted Racoviță as he moved from rock to rock.

The fog lifted and revealed a white world. The men stood on deck urging the ship on through the ice. A few sailors sat on the anchor chains discussing their prospects. It didn’t look good.

At noon they made a deep-sea sounding. They lowered five hundred and sixty meters of wire and brought up a cup of blue clay.

For two days ice rammed the side of the boat. Water froze and the ice expanded until it pressed in from all sides, eventually lifting the boat right out of the water. On March 4th they came to terms with their situation: trapped in ice that was only going to solidify for the next several months.

The wind blew snow and cracking ice into hummocks, so it looked like they were emerging from a landscape with its own topography. Ice crystals grew into forms like jewels or blooming plants.

In order to conserve their food supply, Racoviță shot seals, and Cook, regretfully, beat a penguin to death with a ski. As they headed back to the vessel in the growing gloom, Captain Lecointe mistook Cook for some other animal and was about to try his luck with the rifle.

The aurora australis appeared above them — “trembling lace-work, draped like a curtain, on the southern sky.”

They continued to drift unobstructed. There was no sign of land anywhere around them, as if Antarctica were nothing but a “hypothetical continent”.

As night settled in, the sailors began to sing and whistle and play songs on an accordion. On deck they kicked up their heels and danced and told stories. In the cabin they cranked music boxes that plinked out cheerful tones.

“We are making the dead world of ice about us ring with a boisterous noise”, Cook reported.

Their eyes grew puffy, then their ankles. Their muscles lost all tone until they were soft as mush. Piles, hemorrhoids, headaches, neuralgia, rheumatism. It was impossible to concentrate.

Cook registered their slowing heartbeats becoming weak and irregular. A short walk heightened the pulse and after ten minutes it was hard to breathe. Their footing was so uncertain they had trouble walking straight.

Their cheeks grew pale and green. Their hair grayed but grew rapidly. Skin crept over fingernails. One of the crew members kept fainting, and his mind seemed permanently deranged.

Then for a couple of days he revived. He grew cheerful, talked about how much easier it was to breathe. He said he was sure that after a bit of rest he’d regain his strength, then went to bed and promptly died.

As much as we might want to end our existence, Mechnikov felt there was something embedded in the universal will that urged us on toward propagation and multiplicity.

He liked to quote von Hartmann’s Die Philosophie des Unbewussten, arguing that we should aim for “the complete abandonment of the individual to the cosmic process, in order that the latter may accomplish its end and bring about the universal deliverance of the world.”

A plant turns to the sun. What do these worms want?

He pictured a blind body, squirming and twisting in the freezing muck. Could the hunger for nutrients give rise to a sense of smell? Did the need for sunlight lead to vision?

“The world is but the means for bringing about a condition of nonexistence.”

Captain Lecointe, looking at his miserable aggregation, declared they’d been overtaken by a case of “shivers”. He had them pull out their full-dress suits and come to dinner as smart as they could manage. He opened a crate of champagne from the hold and filled everyone’s glasses. They cooked a sweet concoction of chocolate, milk, and sugar mixed with reindeer fur, penguin grease, blood, and pieces of fishy meat.

A few nights later, observing an eclipse of one of the moons of Jupiter, the captain was able to set his chronometer. Hunching over his calculations, he announced that they had passed Antarctic midnight.

A week later, they could feel the sun’s heat for the first time, indescribably intoxicating. They wandered around the ice sunning themselves “like snakes in spring”.

The ice held together with surprising tenacity. Faced with the prospect of another winter, they tried to blow up the ice with explosives, but that just caused smoke and didn’t even make a hole. The only option was to saw through with saws and hack it with axes.

When they looked through the open door of a house where two pretty girls were standing, it sent a charge through them, “like a Faradic battery”.

The Englishman William Thompson had taken underwater photos decades earlier, but it was really no more than a technological stunt. Boutan wanted everyone to see the beauty of the subaquatic landscape.

As Racoviță unpacked hundreds of bottles of specimens he’d brought back from the southern ice, Boutan was encasing a small apparatus known as a detective camera into a hermetically sealed box and lowering it into the water.

Racoviță watched Boutan enter a diving suit and descend to work with his photographic installation, appearing hours later exhausted and drenched in sweat.

The problem was that with depth the increasing pressure would crush the box, so Boutan had filled it with a membrane of Sumatran gutta-percha he could pump with air, equalizing the pressure from outside. But now in order to get the box to sink, it had to be weighted down with cast iron. But then it was so heavy that when he tried to move it, sweat poured down his forehead, fogging up the pane in his helmet. Blinded by condensation, he tried futilely to rub the pane with his nose or lick it with his tongue.

“Splendid parhelia, paraselenae, and mirage phenomena were remarkable and varied.”

In the Mediterranean afternoon, he described the effects of lack of sunlight through the Antarctic night: “discoloration of the mucous membranes, dyspnoea, acceleration of the pulse, dizziness, insomnia, a complete incapacity for prolonged intellectual work, and a swelling of the legs.”

He catalogued species, mostly small crustaceans and blind worms, that he had been first to identify.

Soon he returned to his home country and began exploring the recesses of the Carpathian Mountains. The endless tunnels near where he was born were as inaccessible as anywhere he’d been. He was crawling through a narrow passage in the Apuseni range where air throbbed back and forth as if the cave were breathing. He scooped water into his hand and once again found isopods — similar but not the same as the small, jointed creatures he’d pulled from the Antarctic hole where Danco had disappeared.